13 February 2012

winter weekend

I've just started reading a book about mushrooms and am not ashamed to admit it. I promise not to bore you with factoids about mushrooms and mushroom hunting and mushroom identification, but let me say that fungi is pretty interesting. And prolific. And I'll leave it at that.

With a now-functioning oven (a 15-minute repair by a trained professional), I celebrated by baking jelly donut cupcakes from Veganomicon. Kudos to any vegan recipe that recommends you actually bypass the healthy, organic version of raspberry jam in favor of the sugar-laden, artificially-flavored kind. Usually vegan recipes can get a bit crunchy-granola (even for me), so I'm liking Isa and her recipes more and more.

We had a bit of thunder snow on Saturday night, but it let up in time for us to attend an early Valentine's house tour of early-20th century homes in Richmond. Talk about some historic house eye candy! The ticket also included appetizers from local restaurants at each house and a wine tasting from the offerings of Cooper Vineyards in Louisa, Virginia. Although I couldn't eat most of the offerings, I did like my wine. We even stopped by one of the featured restaurants for dinner afterwards (The Empress), where I enjoyed a vegetarian version of a Caesar salad with grilled romaine and a vegan seitan dish with greens (don't worry - the beau balanced out the scales of meat-eating).